Lectio

"Nothing can separate us from the Love that is God"words so gently spokena dagger in my heartfinding griefwhere I thought there was none.I do not understand.I do not want to.

Pray with Your Eyes Open

Pray with your eyes open.Speak the gentle bend of a willow branch as it reaches to caress your cheekGive words to the flight of the flicker the magpie the sparrowsUtter the soft brown flutterings of the quail in their scurried quicknessPraise the bejeweled leaves touched by last night's rainWhisper the greenness, the orangeness, the redness of the world around you.Pray with your eyes openAnd when they close,Listen.

Difference

You can keep your pills and your platitudes stop trying to make my brain work the way you think it should.We are different, that's alland if I don't fit with your way of viewing the worldPretend you don't see meIt's easier for everyone that way.

Landscape

The rainhas painted a landscape on my patio - such depth, such tone,such beautiful use of light.Even the way the brick has been laid is perfect:carefully placed glassso I can still see through to the beauty beneath.

Seed Capsule

Look deepwithin this dried capsuleSee the darkness?that black seed?Look again - look furtherit blossoms in a flash of yellow and orangeThe lilylifting its face to the sunIf you can't see it yet,be patient.Tend the seed gentlyLove itWater itWarm itTrust ... that it will appear

Becoming Soup

If you hold your spoon just soYou can turn yourself upside-down and become soup.an interesting duality, but not one I favour.

Beyond the Veil

It was in the passage of your birth that it began, this slipping of veils and intermingling of tides.It was as you moved, gentled from death into birththat I saw the curtains lift and saw beyond to where existence was all there was to being and life and death had no part of it.For a moment I thought I had gone with you was there, beyond the world, looking back through a haze of unreality,then I realized that it was you who was looking back at meand with your second death I began to weep.

Due Process

Some poems can just be written appearing like deer - fully formed and ready to runothers can be laughed out, or cried giggling tearfully onto the pageBut some poems must be Ripped from the womb with great heaving sobsLeaving jagged tears, and becoming their own births.

In the Hands of God

How I wept when they said your name: DominickWhen they labeled you still-born sonStill you were, and still was the only way they knew you

But I I knew your life your joy all your tiny movementsI knew you before you were named before we called you In the Hands of GodThere was nothing I could have donenothing I did i knowBut still i wonder why you chose to goPerhaps you would have stayed if i had loved you more?

Teachings

Does it really matter how we get a teaching? whether someone gives it to us or we find it tucked into some leaves perhaps or hidden in a jaybird's wing.If our hearts are open full of spirit the teaching will be good no matter where it finds us.

Meditatio

"There is nothing that can separate us from the Love that is God" so it is saidand yet nothingis the only thing that does separate us from God even if God never separates from us.It is only in nothingness, in absence of becomingthat we grow so big in our own eyesand turn Godall around us into nothingAnd the great Light becomes darkness

Lost Words

"Your last child died."The blunt force of your words shocked mefrom that nowhere world between labour and birthWhat gives you the right to tell me something I already know so deeplyHow dare you suggest so cruelly that I should follow your adviceThe force of your words shocked meBut the words themselves have since been lost deep in a newborn's cry.

Contemplatio

They are dark, those days those days when we separate ourselves from GodAnd I can see how earth would become hellIf God ever chose to separate himself from us

Many of these words were born or conceived on silent retreat at a place called Naramata Centre. If any of this has touched you or called you to a sacred moment, please consider giving a small gift so that Naramata Centre can maintain this ancient sacred space, and the programs offered there.